A “tongue display unit”—a square grid of four hundred tiny electrodes, the whole unit only slightly larger than a postage stamp—connected to a computer monitor on a rolling cart, which in turn was connected to a camera. The camera attached to my forehead with an elastic headband, similar to a headlamp. The tongue display went in my mouth and directed the camera on the table in front of me.

When I first tried it, instantly little electric shocks tickled my tongue, like when I had touched my tongue to a battery as a kid.

“Investigate the table,” the researcher working with me urged.

At first the sensations felt random, but then something began to emerge. It vibrated in a round shape. I reached out and felt a tennis ball sitting on the table.

“This time,” she continued, “I’m going to roll you the ball. See if you can feel it moving.”

A moment later, I felt a little circular vibration starting at the back of my tongue and moving toward the front. As it moved, the circle got progressively larger. I reached out my hand and actually stopped the ball that was rolling toward the edge of the table.

Saying I was blown away would have been an understatement. As a blind person, it had been twenty-five years since I had experienced hand-to-eye coordination. There were ways of compensating, but nothing was as beautiful and fluid as reaching out and plucking an object out of space. In five minutes, the BrainPort had just reestablished that connection, although I guess this was tongue-to-hand coordination.

The newest version of the BrainPort I was now testing at home after the Desolation Canyon river trip was much smaller and more portable. I put on sport sunglasses that housed a small video camera on the nose bridge. That camera acted as “eyes,” gathering in visual information. The images got transmitted to a small handheld computer about the size of a cell phone, which translated those visual signals to the tongue display. I sat on my couch, moving my hand around in front of my face, holding one finger up, then two, then all my fingers, and finally moving my hand close up against my face and farther away. When Emma was a baby, Ellie described her doing the same thing: wiggling her fingers and toes and using those familiar appendages as a starting place from which to branch out into the world. I felt like a child as I walked around the house, trying to interpret all the images I was feeling.